News of the Weird
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
Checking a boy just before his bar mitzvah, Orthodox rabbis in Sydney, Australia, found that his rabbi-supervised circumcision had not quite been “complete” and ruled that it must be done again because, officially, the boy was not a Jew. The boy’s mother objected and instead found a Progressive synagogue for the bar mitzvah (although the Orthodox rabbi, Moshe Gutnick, said she is “fooling the child” into believing he is Jewish).
Ginnah Muhammad, 42, who was suing a rental car company in Hamtramck, Mich., in October, refused to remove her veil (which covered all but her eyes) on the witness stand, and consequently, the judge refused to accept her testimony and dismissed the lawsuit. He said judges must evaluate witnesses’ credibility, which the veil prevented.
According to an October dispatch from Bangkok appearing in Melbourne’s newspaper The Age, some Muslim teenagers are mixing Coca-Cola, codeine and the native kratom leaf to get high. “Muslims cannot drink alcohol,” said one, but if you get “drunk” on that mixture, “(it) is not a sin.”
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected] or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD